Tom Foolery

 

 Very popular in Vietnam.  Even for sale at TSN airport the last time I was there.

There are neither Confederate monuments to be torn down in Japan nor Battle Flags to be lowered . . . but if there were, there could well be some Japanese who might wish to protest such symbols.

While my wife Rieko would certainly not be among them, when she was attending high school one of her standard 1953 English text books contained an excerpt from Chapter Seven, “The Mother’s Struggle,” in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book “Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Life Among the Lowly.” Since, in Japan, any alternate view of life in the South has been confined almost exclusively to the translations of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel “Gone With the Wind” and the film version of her book three years later, Stowe’s distorted picture of the ante-bellum South undoubtedly made a lasting impact on the minds of many young Japanese. Given that the events leading up to the South’s secession and the ensuing War Between the States had received virtually no press coverage in Japan at the time, Stowe’s 1852 work of abolitionist propaganda has had an unusually long history in the country.

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